Gaming

Cardlings caught my attention recently, a unique turn-based strategy game from Clockwork Chilli that's confirmed to be releasing for Linux on June 5th.

What's interesting about it, is the way the turns work. While one player is doing combat and movement, the other player has the chance to get building and gathering resources. To make it even more unique, only the player doing movement and combat can end the turn and then it's reversed. So this means the player doing the moment, will want to end the turn quickly so the other player doesn't get tons of resources and buildings set up. The developer said this "results in very intense, fast-paced games that still preserve all the depth of more traditional turn-based strategy titles".

Clam Man from Team Clam is a new comedy adventure game, it just recently released with Linux support. It's a point and click adventure, although it has a focus on the story rather than pushing you through puzzles.

Dandara, a very unique take on the action metroidvania genre took me by surprise with the fun gameplay last month and now the Linux version is actually up to date.

The main problem, as noted in the previous article, was that the Linux version of Dandara hadn't seen any updates since release. The developer, Long Hat House, actually emailed in last night to note that the whole game has been updated and they've managed to now get the Linux version on equal footing too.

Ever since I first heard of Eagle Island I was basically in love, with super slick pixel-art and an owl you throw as your weapon? Sign me up.

The demo just recently went live on Steam, including for Linux and after giving it a go I've come away from it extremely impressed. It works beautifully and it looks gorgeous, probably one of the best demos I've played for some time. I even joked about the demo splash-screen missing a Linux icon with the developer on Twitter, which they took it rather well as they just haven't yet found a good one to use.

Cardlings caught my attention recently, a unique turn-based strategy game from Clockwork Chilli that's confirmed to be releasing for Linux on June 5th.

What's interesting about it, is the way the turns work. While one player is doing combat and movement, the other player has the chance to get building and gathering resources. To make it even more unique, only the player doing movement and combat can end the turn and then it's reversed. So this means the player doing the moment, will want to end the turn quickly so the other player doesn't get tons of resources and buildings set up. The developer said this "results in very intense, fast-paced games that still preserve all the depth of more traditional turn-based strategy titles".

Developers between the Wine and Mingw-w64 projects are discussing the potential for further embracing their relationship given the overlap in trajectory and both benefiting from close collaboration. This extended relationship could also involve Mingw-w64 potentially adopting Wine's branding.

While all Phoronix readers should be aware of Wine, for those not familiar with Mingw-w64 it's the off-shoot of MinGW focused on 64-bit support and other features over the original MinGW for providing an open-source development toolchain for Microsoft Windows. Mingw-w64 remains quite active in working on its GCC-based compiler toolchain support for Windows.

The developers behind IRKALLA emailed in today and it grabbed my interest right away with the supremely stylish art behind it. The odd setting has my curiosity too, with mechs versus demons!

According to the developer, it's a "platform-tactic game" so it has elements of an action platformer with character progression and some form of base defence building. IRKALLA has been in development for quite a few years now with their TIGForum post dating all the way back to 2013. We've been emailed today, as it seems development on it has been picked back up as they told me it's "finally coming together" and a Linux release is also confirmed of course.

The release of Vambrace: Cold Soul on May 28th is getting close now, it's quite an impressive looking game that I've been playing and they have a new feature trailer. I won't say too much on it myself before release but since I've had access for a while, I can say it works great on Linux.

ZED, a game that will tell the story of an artist suffering from dementia from Eagre Games and Cyan Ventures now has a release date and it's quite soon.

The Windows version is now scheduled in for June 4th, with the Linux (and Mac) version to be "later in June". Great to see it continue to be confirmed and although there is a delay, it's not going to be long it seems. Good thing too, as I'm damn excited for this one.

Funselektor Labs, the developer of Absolute Drift has announced their latest game, art of rally. It might look stylish but it's not just a pretty face, as the developer is also focused on how the cars handle too.

While we have a few racing games now like Grid Autosport, DiRT Rally/4 and some F1 games (plus a few that work with Steam Play), they're all quite serious business. art of rally looks to be taking a slightly less realistic focus while still providing a challenge, especially with the top-down view you get a better picture of what's up ahead.

Seems Valve are on a bit of a roll lately fixing up some long-standing issues in the Steam Client for Linux.

They've been released quite a number of Beta client updates recently with Linux improvements, like the one last week which had a fix for a this two year old issue where you were unable to move games around if they had files bigger than 2GB.

The latest Beta, released today fixes another long-standing issue with gamepad Rumble support. Valve said they "Added support for rumble pass-through for virtual controllers. This fixes missing rumble support for any controllers opted into Steam Input, and rumble emulation support for the Steam controller.".

Gladiabots makes me feel dumb, very dumb. It asks you to create various AI and assign them to robots, to face off against another team of robots in a battle arena.

It's a strategy game of sorts, while also being a logic puzzle programming game at its heart as well. It offers up a single-player campaign, which realistically is just a (quite good) extended tutorial to get you ready to compete against other real people. This is where it really gets interesting, as it offers online play but it's of the asynchronous sort so you're not playing at the same time, meaning it doesn't actually need people online to play which makes it pretty sweet.

Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, possibly one of the biggest Total War games yet is officially out. Developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA, it was ported by Feral Interactive and they managed to get Linux support in right away.

It's like a much fancier version of Steam's own ability to add games installed from other sources, as Galaxy 2.0 will also support cross-launcher friends lists and chat making it sound pretty darn handy. They do also state you can "Connect more platforms and add new features with open-source integrations.". Those hoping that is some kind of olive branch being extended for Linux will likely be disappointed though, going by their FAQ on the newer dedicated Galaxy site it sounds more like it's simply for adding other services into the client itself for those GOG haven't yet done.

This would have been the perfect time to finally announce the ridiculously long-overdue Linux support for GOG Galaxy (especially with the Epic Store also not supporting Linux), sadly GOG are continuing to leave Linux out. In response to a user question on Twitter about Linux, the GOG team simply said "GOG GALAXY 2.0 will be available for Windows and Mac.". While an honest answer, it's also pretty blunt. No mention of it coming, just a whole lot of nothing.

Computer games have been around about as long as computers have. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. But Zork is more than that. For portability and size reasons, Zork itself is written in Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), makes heavy use of the brand-new concept of object-oriented programming, and runs on a virtual machine. All this back in 1979. They used every trick in the book to pack as much of the Underground Empire into computers that had only 32 kB of RAM. But more even more than a technological tour de force, Zork is an unmissable milestone in the history of computer gaming. But it didn’t spring up out of nowhere.

[...]

While home computers were still scarce, the concept of selling software to regular consumers was also new. This was the time when the Atari 2600 had just gone on sale, starting the second generation game consoles that were expandable to play more that one game through the use of plug-in cartridges. It was a new market, with many questions among MIT, Stanford and other students regarding the open hacker culture versus the world of commercial software. Some, like Richard Stallman, not changing their stance on this much since their student days at MIT.

As the Zork developers were graduating, they realized that with the success of Zork on their hands, they had this one chance to commercialize it, taking their lives and careers into an entirely different direction from their original goals. With little standing in their way, Infocom was founded on June 22nd, 1979.

As we've talked about before, it seems an era of gaming platform wars is upon us. While Valve's Steam platform mostly only had to contend with less-used storefronts like GOG and Origin, a recent front was opened up by the Epic Games Store, which has promised better cuts to publishers to get exclusive games and has attempted to wage a PR battle to make people mad at Steam. It's all quite involved, with opinions varying across the internet as to who the good and bad guys in this story are.

It's been three months now since the AMD Radeon VII 7nm "Vega 20" graphics card was released and while we hopefully won't be waiting much longer for Navi to make its debut, for the time being this is the latest and great AMD Radeon consumer graphics card -- priced at around $700 USD. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon VII on Linux and compared to various high-end NVIDIA graphics cards while all testing happened from Ubuntu 19.04.

Fortunately, the open-source Radeon VII Linux support is in fact in great shape. There was some confusion for some weeks and a lack of benchmarks recently since I had been unable to get my Vega 20 graphics card running reliably. Under different OpenGL/Vulkan workloads and even some desktop tasks, the graphics card would freeze and spewing from dmesg would most often be a load of VMC page faults and other errors stemming from AMDGPU. But after a lot of testing, ultimately it was figured out the graphics card became defective in some manner. The original card was a pre-launch Radeon VII review sample and was my lone Vega 20 GPU but has now been fortunately replaced by AMD. I received a new Radeon VII last week and since then has been under near constant load/testing. This new card has been working out well and I haven't encountered any issues with this retail card, unlike the woes I experienced with the original VII a few weeks after launch. It was a bit surprising the original Radeon VII failed especially without having done any over-clocking to it (granted was pushed very hard for a few weeks with all of my benchmarking workloads), but whatever the case, this retail Radeon VII is working out fine on Ubuntu 19.04 and various kernel/Mesa upgrades.

In helping to speed-up game load times when switching to the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver and smooth out frame-rates for games sporadically loading shaders, Mesa 19.2-devel has added on-disk shader cache support for the driver.

Intel's existing "i965" classic Mesa driver has long supported an on-disk shader cache along with the other Mesa OpenGL drivers while now the Gallium3D shader cache functionality has been extended for the new Iris driver.

Google Search by default has games hidden in it, which is a fact, not many Google users are aware of. Google has compiled some really authentic and entertaining games over a period of time, that can be played in Google.com page itself without having to visit any other Web page.

Most of these games were made to appear as Google Doodle, in relation with certain anniversaries that have been a remarkable day in history. While some of these games are not available easily because Google Doodle keeps changing.

However, a few of them continue to be played even today. All you need is to search the game by its name in Google and hit “search” and Voila! The games will appear right in front of your eyes and you can play them right then and there.

Read on to know about the playable games still available, though hidden within the Google Search.

Now that Valve have upgraded the chat and friends system in the desktop Steam client, they've also rolled out a brand new dedication mobile application to do the same.

This isn't the normal Steam mobile application, instead they've oddly decided to split them in two. Touching on that, they said the original Steam mobile application is going to get some upgrades "focused on account security" including better Steam Guard options, like QR codes and a one-touch login.

Dota Auto Chess, a very popular custom game mode for Dota 2 is being turned into a stand-alone game by Valve.

The Dota 2 arcade is full of interesting games but nothing has really come close to Dota Auto Chess, looking at it right now it has over 125K people playing just this one game mode. It also has over 8 million people subscribed to it, to give you another idea of just how popular it is. Based on player-count, if it manages to keep it for the stand-alone version it would put it into the top-5 games on Steam.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's newer Battle Royale mode, Danger Zone, continues to be tweaked and the original map has made a return.

This should help spice things up a bit, as Blacksite is quite a good map but I've also immensely enjoyed playing on the newer and more open Sirocco map. Thankfully, Valve have now enabled Danger Zone for both maps together as a "time-based map rotation" as you can see below:

In the latest release of DXVK 1.2.1 that was released last week, it included a note about improved GPU utilization. They certainly weren’t kidding, with Overwatch now performing even better on Linux with Wine.

When I previously wrote about it, I said I was in shock at how well you could play Overwatch on Linux thanks to Wine, DXVK and a little help from Lutris. I included a video in the previous article to show it off, which showed the framerate hardly going above 100FPS and often dipped down to around 60FPS. Checking back, previous versions of DXVK didn’t let my NVIDIA 980ti GPU utilization go above 80%.

We are into May 2019, and it’s time for our monthly roundup of most downloaded Tizen apps and games for the previous month. The month of April 2019 did not see many new entrants making their way into that coveted Top 20 list, just three to be precise.

An action game named Zombie Derby made the biggest jump to find itself on the fourth spot, whereas another action game, Mountain Sniper Jungle, enters the Top 20 list in the sixteenth position. A train simulator game named Euro Train Driving is the last new entrant on the list at seventeenth. The list is led by the usual trio of WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook Messenger. The rest of the story is also pretty much the same: Hancom Office Viewer, Opera Mini web browser, HERE Maps, Instagram, Smart Tutor, Xender etc.

Here's another game successfully funded on Kickstarter, one we missed, which looks fantastic and it's coming to Linux. It's called Pixel Noir and it sure does look stylish.

It was funded on Kickstarter back in 2015 with the help of nearly two thousand backers. Interestingly, the reason we didn't pick it up is that the campaign wasn't originally targetting Linux as a platform.

Not originally scheduled to release same-day with Linux support, Hell is Other Demons, developed by Cuddle Monster Games and publishing from Kongregate is out now and it's damn good.

Hell is Other Demons is a ridiculously good retro-looking arcade shooter, one that I've pretty much fallen in love with. From the moment I got to test it, I was hooked right in thanks to the incredible styling. That's not all though, while the game is mechanically simple as it's basically a platform shooter with tiny arenas it's in no way easy. It manages to do a lot with the simplicity, while also giving you a lot of choice.

The whole idea of the game is pretty sweet, giving a different kind of action and survival experience. It has a nice gameplay loop to it already with you picking a breed, constructing your creature and then attempting to survive while also possibly unlocking a new breed if you collect enough of their DNA. Once you manage to take down the Queen, you also get to play with the Aquarium feature, which is basically a sandbox area to do whatever you want.

Regions Of Ruin from Vox Games and Poysky Productions, a side-scrolling RPG with town-building is now available DRM-free on GOG. A nice reminder of it too, one we completely missed actually being properly released for Linux.

Afterlight really does look beautiful, with a "2.5D" style this puzzle-adventure is one to firmly keep an eye on.

It's currently looking for funding on Kickstarter, with Linux as a planned platform for release "Our main platform is PC (Windows, Mac & Linux) via Steam" and their FAQ also makes it clear Linux is a target too. With 24 days to go, they're closing in on half of the $35K goal.

Tank Maniacs, a local multiplayer party game about blowing up everyone with tanks looks really fun and it's coming to Linux. I managed to get confirmation from the developer on Twitter, who mentioned a Linux build is now up for those testing it.

A game that doesn't exactly need a long description, you each pilot a strange tank and attempt to destroy everyone else. As the developer says "It's mostly about destroying your closest friends' hopes and dreams with weird tanks."—hah.

Super Powered Battle Friends from Cache Grab Studios is a new platform fighter, with both local and online play and it's now in Early Access. As promised on the rather unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, it was release with same-day Linux support.

Geneshift continues to evolve into a very interesting top-down action game, mixing in a single-player/co-op campaign, various traditional multiple modes and a Battle Royale.

The developer, Nik Nak Studios, said they're celebrating ten years since Geneshift first came online (originally under other names). This latest update pulls in some inspiration from GTA2, adding in roaming civilians you can take down which will eventually become aggressive towards you. The more you kill, the higher their aggression rating and loot dropping will be giving the various online modes like Deathmatch and Battle Royale a little mini-game.

For those who create videos and livestreams, OBS Studio is for the most part all you need. It continues advancing too, with a Release Candidate out for OBS 23.2.

New features this time around include a hotkey to toggle the preview, the ability to preview scene transitions, the ability to estimate recording time available based on disk space (not that I've seen it, might be Windows only), a "luma" key video filter, the ability to copy and paste filter to/from scenes in addition to sources, the ability to centre items vertically or horizontally in the transform menus, a message when there's no sources included in a scene to help new users and numerous other enhancements.

Best get your running shoes, you're going to need them to compete in DASH: Danger Action Speed Heroes. This fast-paced competitive platformer from Baby Duka and Schubell IT will also let your creative juices flow since a lot of the levels are made by people like you and me.

We’re closing in on the midway point of 2019 so let’s slow down for a moment, take a step back and look at some of the top games released with Linux support so far this year.

Note: I am not counting Early Access or in-Beta titles and only including games that support Linux, so for those looking for something new you can expect a full completable experience with any of these titles. Also, it’s in no particular order as this isn’t meant as a best to worse compilation. Also, some may have had their official Linux releases later than the other platforms.

Klei Entertainment have decided to delayed the full release of Oxygen Not Included, with it moving to July.

They're going to have open testing around the end of June, sounds like it's all going well but sometimes extra time is just needed. Game development is complicated and Oxygen Not Included needs some more testing and polishing. They said "We’re feeling good about the content of this final update and we really think you will like what we have cooking but if we launch as scheduled, the update would not have seen much testing and it’s just not as polished as we (or you) would like.".

Re-Logic have announced that Terraria has officially sold a massive 27 million copies, 12 million of those being on PC and they're not stopping.

Sounds like it's going to be a big year for Terraria, they're teasing some big updates for the PC version. Sounds like they might be showing some new stuff off during the 2019 PC Gaming Show next month, although they made it clear they're "not going to be the latest Epic exclusive" and they will stay on Steam like they've been since the beginning.

Simple Dot has a simple idea, balls drop from a bucket and you have to draw lines to get them into a bucket somewhere else. It's out now with same-day Linux support and I gave it a run to see if it's worth your time.

Best Command-Line FTP Clients for Linux

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used for transferring files between a client and a server on a computer network. The very first FTP applications were made for the command line before GUI Operating Systems even became a thing and while there are several GUI FTP clients, developers still make CLI-based FTP clients for users who prefer using the old method.
Here’s a list of the best command-line based FTP clients for Linux.

Why Windows Containers Are Less Attractive Than Linux Containers

The fact that you can run Docker containers on Windows as well as Linux is amazing. Yet, I sometimes struggle to see a clear use case for Windows containers. Compared to Linux containers, there are fewer obvious reasons to run containers on Windows.
I know that’s a somewhat controversial statement, so let me walk through the various reasons why Windows containers are much less attractive than Linux containers.
Also: Streamlining Software Development and Distribution with Containers [Ed: Paid-for SPAM from EMC. “Buying the news”… the new “biz model”? Companies literally buying not only the narratives but also the space and the staff?]

Android and GNU/Linux Software on Chrome OS

The new feature was first noticed by Keith I Myers. It is available in Chrome OS 76.0.3789.0, which is the first dev build of Chrome OS 76. It goes without saying that the feature is unstable right now. It is in the very early stages, so bugs and stability issues are to be expected. Also, keep in mind that GPU acceleration is only supported on a handful of Chromebooks...

For the past few years, it’s been possible on many Chromebooks to install the Play Store and run Android apps. This opened the door for Chromebooks to become more than just glorified web browsers. Now, Google is looking to make some major under-the-hood changes to Chrome OS’s Android apps support, which may allow for a long-requested feature.